Part 13 (1/2)

But one can not leave Romains unread. His interest is more than a prose interest, he has verse technique, rhyme, terminal syzygy, but that is not what I mean. He is poetry in:

On ne m'a pas donne de lettres, ces jours-ci; Personne n'a songe, dans la ville, a m'ecrire, Oh! je n'esperais rien; je sais vivre et penser Tout seul, et mon esprit, pour faire une flambee, N'attend pas qu'on lui jette une feuille noircie.

Mais je sens qu'il me manque un plaisir familier, J'ai du bonheur aux mains quand j'ouvre une enveloppe; * * * * * * * *

But such statements as:

TENTATION

Je me plais beaucoup trop a rester dans les gares; Accoude sur le bois anguleux des barrieres, Je regarde les trains s'emplir de voyageurs.

and:

Mon esprit solitaire est une goutte d'huile Sur la pensee et sur le songe de la ville Qui me laissent flotter et ne m'absorbent pas.

would not be important unless they were followed by exposition. The point is that they are followed by exposition, to which they form a necessary introduction, defining Romains' angle of attack; and as a result the force of Romains is c.u.mulative. His early books gather meaning as one reads through the later ones.

And I think if one opens him almost anywhere one can discern the authentic accent of a man saying something, not the desultory impagination of rehash.

Charles Vildrac is an interesting companion figure to his brilliant friend Romains. He conserves himself, he is never carried away by Romains' theories. He admires, differs, and occasionally formulates a corrective or corollary as in ”Gloire.”

Compare this poem with Romains' ”Ode to the Crowd Here Present” and you get the two angles of vision.

Henry Spiess, a Genevan lawyer, has written an interesting series of sketches of the court-room. He is a more or less isolated figure. I have seen amusing and indecorous poems by George Fourest, but it is quite probable that they amuse because one is unfamiliar with their genre; still ”La Blonde Negresse” (the heroine of his t.i.tle), his satire of the symbolo-rhapsodicoes in the series of poems about her: ”La negresse blonde, la blonde negresse,” gathering into its sound all the swish and woggle of the sound-over-sensists; the poem on the beautiful blue-behinded baboon; that on the gentleman ”qui ne craignait ni la verole ni dieu”; ”Les pianos du Casino au bord de la mer” (Laforgue plus the four-hour touch), are an egregious and diverting guffaw. (I do not think the book is available to the public. J.G. Fletcher once lent me a copy, but the edition was limited and the work seems rather unknown.)

Romains is my chief concern. I can not give a full exposition of Unanimism on a page or two. Among all the younger writers and groups in Paris, the group centering in Romains is the only one which seems to me to have an energy comparable to that of the _Blast_ group in London,[3]

the only group in which the writers for _Blast_ can be expected to take very much interest.

Romains in the flesh does not seem so energetic as Lewis in the flesh, but then I have seen Romains only once and I am well acquainted with Lewis. Romains is, in his writing, more placid, the thought seems more pa.s.sive, less impetuous. As for those who will not have Lewis ”at any price,” there remains to them no other course than the acceptance of Romains, for these two men hold the two tenable, positions: the Mountain and the Mult.i.tude.

It might be fairer to Romains to say simply he has chosen, or specialized in, the collected mult.i.tude as a subject matter, and that he is quite well on a mountain of his own.

My general conclusions, redoing and reviewing this period of French poetry, are (after my paw-over of some sixty new volumes as mentioned, and after re-reading most of what I had read before):

1. As stated in my opening, that mediocre poetry is about the same in all countries; that France has as much drivel, gas, mush, etc., poured into verse, as has any other nation.

2. That it is impossible ”to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear,” or poetry out of nothing; that all attempts to ”expand” a subject into poetry are futile, fundamentally; that the subject matter must be coterminous with the expression. Ta.s.so, Spenser, Ariosto, prose poems, diffuse forms of all sorts are all a preciosity; a parlor-game, and dilutations go to the sc.r.a.p heap.

3. That Corbiere, Rimbaud, Laforgue are permanent; that probably some of De Gourmont's and Tailhade's poems are permanent, or at least reasonably durable; that Romains is indispensable, for the present at any rate; that people who say they ”don't like French poetry” are possibly matoids, and certainly ignorant of the scope and variety of French work.

In the same way people are ignorant of the qualities of French people; ignorant that if they do not feel at home in Amiens (as I do not), there are other places in France; in the Charente if you walk across country you meet people exactly like the nicest people you can meet in the American country and _they are not ”foreign.”_

All France is not to be found in Paris. The adjective ”French” is current in America with a dozen erroneous or stupid connotations. If it means, as it did in the mouth of my contemporary, ”talc.u.m powder” and surface neatness, the selection of poems I have given here would almost show the need of, or at least a reason for, French Parna.s.sienism; for it shows the French poets violent, whether with the violent words of Corbiere, or the quiet violence of the irony of Laforgue, the sudden annihilations of his ”turn-back” on the subject. People forget that the incision of Voltaire is no more all of French Literature than is the _robustezza_ of Brantome. (Burton of the ”Anatomy” is our only writer who can match him.) They forget the two distinct finenesses of the Latin French and of the French ”Gothic,” that is of the eighteenth century, of Bernard (if one take a writer of no great importance to ill.u.s.trate a definite quality), or of D'Orleans and of Froissart in verse. From this delicacy, if they can not be doing with it, they may turn easily to Villon or Ba.s.selin. Only a general distaste for literature can be operative against all of these writers.

UNANIMISME

The English translation of Romains' ”Mort de Quelqu'un” has provoked various English and American essays and reviews. His published works are ”L'Ame des Hommes,” 1904; ”Le Bourg Regenere,” 1906; ”La Vie Unanime,”

1908; ”Premier Livre de Prieres,” 1909; ”La Foule qui est Ici,” 1909; in 1910 and 1911 ”Un Etre en Marche,” ”Deux Poemes,” ”Manuel de Deification,” ”L'armee dans la Ville,” ”Puissances de Paris,” and ”Mort de Quelqu'un,” employing the three excellent publis.h.i.+ng houses of the _Mercure_, Figuiere and Sansot.